DEFINITION January 2018

USER REVIEW DAVINCI RESOLVE 14

implement a collaborative set-up with no extra expense. Once it’s set up, the collaborative features are very powerful. At the basic level, bin locking works similarly to Avid. The first person to open a bin, or select a clip or a timeline, gets read and write access – anyone else can open the bin read-only. You can see who has a bin open in the bin list. You can change the name and colour badge of each collaborator, to make it easier to track who is who. With Resolve, all changes are saved automatically, so to prevent a barrage of modifications flying around the system, you choose when to inform the other users of what you have done. Selecting another bin will lock the new one, and unlock the previous one, but it’s also possible to manually lock a bin – for instance the main sequence bin for your episode, as you know that you are the only person working on that sequence, but others may wish to look at it. Similarly, you can choose not to lock a bin when you look at it – so that you can have a sneaky peak without denying anyone else access. Of course, the bin will be opened read-only, so you can’t unintentionally overwrite anyone else’s work. There is a Chat application built into Resolve, so that you can hassle your collaborators to unlock bins, or question them about changes they have made, or arrange to meet down the pub. All this is pretty flexible, but Resolve 14 has another trick. If a collaborator duplicates and then edits your timeline, you can merge these changes back into your timeline, should you wish. There is a clear,

EACH HIGHLIGHTED CHANGE CAN BE ACCEPTED OR REJECTED INDIVIDUALLY

save significant amounts of money, both in the initial purchase cost and ongoing maintenance. As a grading system, Resolve has always had to play nicely with other software, through EDLs, AAFs and the like, so you can be reasonably confident that you can, for instance, get your edit’s rough audio mix out of Resolve and into ProTools for the final dub, or your picture edit into Avid Symphony. More sensibly, you could set up a collaborative workflow with your colour timer using Resolve in the grading suite, and the audio finishing being done in Fairlight (perhaps a bigger ask, given ProTool’s dominance of the market). The release version of Fairlight still doesn’t have the complete feature set – at the time of writing, for instance, you can’t slide audio – but with the Edit page now having sub-frame audio editing, you can always flip between the two editors, should need be. Eventually, of course, Blackmagic will implement the full Fairlight NLE, and will probably expand and extend it considerably, if their development of past acquisitions is anything to go by. All the collaborative tools require the full, Studio version of Resolve, but at £229 (no subscription required, and updates are free) it makes the price of Media Composer and Premiere Pro look outrageous. Perhaps it’s time that we regarded Resolve not as a grading suite, with a bit of editing and audio built in, but as a full and powerful NLE, audio workstation and grading suite, enabling these three departments to work and collaborate together, within the one software package.

graphical indication of the differences between the two timelines, and each highlighted change can be accepted or rejected individually. This is a very powerful feature, though it should still be used with care, or course. I would love this to be extended to providing proper version control, where you could see the difference between your current timeline and a previous, stored version. Remember where you read it first. Version 14 of DaVinci Resolve has turned it into a true contender for high-end, long form, collaborative film and TV editing. It’s significant, I believe, that any networked storage can be used for collaborating within Resolve, unlike Avid, which requires an ‘Avid aware’ system, like Avid’s own NEXIS, or the products from Facilis or EditShare. The ability to use high-reliability storage from conventional IT suppliers, rather than these proprietary systems, is likely to

IMAGES Content management above and grading, the origin of the Resolve story.

DEFINITION JANUARY 2018

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